How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill
Number of quotes: 17
Book ID: 111 Page: 21
Section: 1A
Though Ausonius is a Christian convert, as his “Oratio” shows, his Christianity is a cloak to be donned and removed, as needed. It was, no doubt, what everyone else was doing. His real worldview glimmers through all his work---a sort of agnostic paganism that enabled him to evoke the silent shades of the pagan underworld without ever giving the reader the sense that he believes in any world but this one.3C
Quote ID: 2651
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 111 Page: 22
Section: 4B
Fecund Venus and bloody Mars did not vacate the field to the pathetic, pacifist Christ. Rather, the life of the old religion had already drained away; and by the time Christianity came to the attention of the Roman gentry, the gods were shadows of their formerly lively selves.
Quote ID: 2652
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 111 Page: 23
Section: 4B
Consul, the highest position any Roman (apart from the royal family) can attain.
Quote ID: 2653
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 111 Page: 24
Section: 4B
During the four centuries that elapsed from the time of Augustus to the time of Ausonius, the life of the capital turned ever more insubstantial and brittle, so that some ceremony or other, meticulously executed, could become the apogee of a man’s life.
Quote ID: 2654
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 111 Page: 30
Section: 1A,3D2
As Theodoric, the homely king of the Ostrogoths, was fond of saying: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor roman would want to be like a Goth.”
Quote ID: 2655
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 111 Page: 39
Section: 5D
For Augustine is the first human being to say “I”---and to mean what we mean today. His Confessions are, therefore, the first genuine autobiography in human history.
Quote ID: 2656
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 111 Page: 58
Section: 1A
We did lose, at any rate, the spirit of classical civilization.
Quote ID: 2657
Time Periods: 146
Book ID: 111 Page: 60
Section: 3A1
There is, however, one classical tradition that survived the transition---the still-living tradition of Roman law.
Quote ID: 2658
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 111 Page: 61
Section: 3A1,3A4
There was, moreover, one office that survived intact from the classical to the medieval polis: the office of Catholic bishop.
Quote ID: 2659
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 111 Page: 62/63
Section: 3A1,4B
“From the beginning of my episcopacy,” the aristocratic Cyprian of Carthage, monumental bishop of third-century Africa, confided to his clergy, “I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people.” By the end of Augustine’s life, such consultation was becoming the exception. Democracy depends on a well-informed electorate; and bishops could no longer rely on the opinion of their flocks - increasingly, uninformed and harried illiterates.In many districts, they were already the sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order. They began to appoint one another and thus was born - five centuries after the death of Jesus - the self-perpetuating hierarch that rules the Catholic church to this day.
Quote ID: 2660
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 111 Page: 64/65
Section: 3A2A
Augustine aligns himself with the civil arm to persecute the Donatists and bring them forcibly within the walls of Catholicism. He subsequently writes the first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error: error has no rights: to disbelieve in forced conversions is to deny the power of God.
Quote ID: 2661
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 111 Page: 65
Section: 3A2A,3A2B
Augustine, the last great man of Roman antiquity, is going over the edge. The doctrine he has enunciated will echo down the ages in the cruelest infamies, executed with the highest justification. Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition.
Quote ID: 2662
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 111 Page: 66
Section: 3A2A
Here is Augustine at his Ciceronian worst, arguing without regard to fairness or truth, arguing to win---by the most scurrilous kind of argument, the ad hominem.
Quote ID: 2663
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 111 Page: 66
Section: 2E2
Augustine goes further, and by the end of his life, the reformed profligate deems a woman’s embraces “sordid, filthy, and horrible.”
Quote ID: 2664
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 111 Page: 67
Section: 3A2A,3A2B
Augustine, for all his greatness, has become in old age the type of evil cleric, full of mercy for those who fear him, full of seething contempt for those who dare to oppose him, scheming to make common cause with Babylon and whatever state-sponsored cruelty will, in the name of Order, suppress his opposition. There is not a country in the world today that does not still possess a few examples of the type.
Quote ID: 2665
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 111 Page: 200
Section: 2E4
But the stricter Roman Christianity of Augustine’s Canterbury was also slowly spreading north and west through the English territories, and was bound eventually to meet Celtic Christianity, marching in the opposite direction. A clash of custom and sensibility was as unavoidable as it had been between Columbanus and the Burgundian bishops. It came to a head at a synod, held in 664 at the Abbey of Whitby in Northumbria, at which the Northumbrian king ruled in favor of the “Roman” party---that is, the party who were heirs to Augustine’s papal mission. The main issue---as had also, by the way, been the case in the Burgundian synod---was the correct date for celebrating Easter.
Quote ID: 2666
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 111 Page: 204
Section: 2E4
Even the “Romans” at Whitby presented their point of view in the new way. They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind---one set of bones versus another. Indeed, the Northumbrian king, who ruled in favor of the Roman party, did so because he imagined that Peter, Rome’s supposed first bishop, to whom Jesus had, in a metaphorical phrase, given “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” would use those keys to lock the king out of heaven if he ruled against Rome.
Quote ID: 2667
Time Periods: 7
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